


Credo.

by orange_crushed



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Comfort/Angst, Episode Related, Episode Tag, Gen, M/M, Season 9 Episode 10 - Road Trip, Season/Series 09
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-15
Updated: 2014-01-15
Packaged: 2018-01-08 21:01:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1137349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orange_crushed/pseuds/orange_crushed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I belong wherever you belong," Castiel says.</p><p> <br/>(<i>cre·do, noun, 1. a statement of the beliefs or aims that guide someone's actions; an article of faith.</i>)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Credo.

Castiel’s phone rings in the middle of the night; he picks it up and mutes it and it vibrates in his fingers then, trembling but silent. Sam’s asleep in another room down the hall but Castiel knows he sleeps fitfully, shallowly. He will until he’s healed. The phone in Castiel’s hand lights up with a number he doesn’t recognize. He presses the little button on the left, and holds it to his ear.

“ _Cas_?”

"I’m here," he says. There is an exhaled breath on the other end that rattles into the receiver. "Where are you?"

"Nowhere," Dean says. "How’s Sam?"

"Asleep," Castiel says. "Healing. He’ll be fine in a few days." He is glad at least to have such good news. But there is a second half to that sentence that Castiel doesn’t voice. It is about time, about there being enough time to turn around and come back, to come home. It will only send Dean skittering away again into the dark, into the vastness of a world in which Castiel cannot track him, at least not fast enough. So Castiel sits silent and swallows his invitation down. "How are you?" he asks, at last.

"Fine," Dean says.

"Dean-"

"I’m fine, said I’m fine, who cares, Cas." The words sound uncoordinated in his mouth; he’s drunk, or just exhausted. Castiel thinks about him pulled over at the side of the road, or alone in a shabby motel. He doesn’t want to, but he can’t help it. This is a strange remnant of his humanity: the helpless, ceaseless way his brain spun stories around minutiae, fragments of data, the way he couldn’t stop being fretful and anxious at night, scared and sad when he was alone. He imagines Dean sitting on the floor of a warehouse, losing blood. Limbs slack and words slurring together, his thumb on the _end call_ button. Castiel doesn’t know how to make these thoughts stop.

"You won’t tell me where you are," Castiel says. He knows he sounds angry. He’s not angry. He thinks he might be afraid. "You could at least have the courtesy not to lie about _how_ you are.” There is silence from the other end. Castiel holds the phone out in front of his face and stares at it, thinking that Dean has hung up. He hasn’t. Castiel puts it back to his ear, cups his other hand over the side of his head, so that the world close by vanishes and all he hears is the staticky emptiness, and Dean’s soft breathing.

"I’m," Dean says, and cuts himself off. "I feel like shit."

"Come back," Castiel says. He can’t keep the words out of his mouth anymore, he can’t hold them in. "Come back, Dean, you belong-"

"I belong in hell," Dean says.

And Castiel throws his phone against the wall.

He can’t believe he’s actually done it, at first. He sits and stares across the room with both of his hands empty; he looks down at his fingers and can’t believe he’s not holding anything. And then he gets up and gathers the broken pieces together on his knees, scrambles to find the broken battery case and to try and slide it back together. It’s shattered and the screen is cracked, it’s ruined, he can’t understand why his body did this, he didn’t mean to, he didn’t want to. His hands shake until he forces them to stop. And then he holds his palms together over the phone and concentrates, and it’s whole again. It feels dead and heavy in his palm like a stone. He presses the button that turns it on, and it flares sluggishly to life. There is still a thin crack at the top of the casing, a flaw in his repair. He scrolls through the menu clumsily and finds the last number that dialed him. He presses call. It rings once, twice, and then clicks.

"Dean?" he says. "Dean."

"Yeah."

Castiel shuts his eyes and holds a hand to his face. He sits there on his knees and tries to hold onto the grace at the center of him, the core of faultless strength that is supposed to make him- if not perfect, then at least calm. Whole. He has never had to do this before. He _was_ grace, and now he is- now he is two things, or more than two things, a forest of things, a spillover of want and grief and something he thinks only Dean could name for him, if Dean ever would. 

"You don’t belong in hell," Castiel says. He can hear Dean start to say something back, something resigned and glib and bitter, and Castiel just talks over him. "You don’t belong there, you could never belong there, and I will never let you go back. Do you understand me? I pulled you from that place and you will _never_ go back there.” Dean doesn’t say anything. “Tell me that you understand,” Castiel says.

"I screwed up," Dean says, instead. "I screwed everything up."

"I know," Castiel says. "And I already told you, we are the same. Do I deserve to go to hell?"

"What the fuck," Dean snaps, on the other end. " _No_. Why the fuck would you even-“

"I belong wherever you belong," Castiel says.

There is another silence.

"Cas," Dean says. 

"Please come back," Castiel says. "When I was a man, you told me, whatever I’d done, we would fix it together."

"Yeah," Dean says. "I’m full of great advice."

"Stop," Castiel says. Dean sighs.

"I don’t really know how."

"We’ll figure it out," Castiel says. "The three of us."

"Okay," says Dean. "Okay." There is something strange in his voice, soft and uncertain. Castiel can hear how tired he is, how lost. It hurts. He has cupped that soul in his hands and he longs for it now, aches for it the way people ache when they are beaten, when they are hungry and sick, when they are alone in the dark. He’s been all of those things, he has a basis for comparison at last. He does not say all this out loud. He was not an especially subtle human but he knows at least that he can’t express that kind of thing over the phone. 

"You’re coming back?" 

"Yeah," Dean says.

"I’ll be waiting," says Castiel.

For a moment, neither of them hang up.

 

 

.


End file.
